Spies could use your TV to snoop on you

According to CIA director David Petraeus, spies could now snoop you through your TV and would no longer need to plant bugs in your room.

Spies could now snoop on you through your TV, dispensing with the necessity of planting bugs in your room, according to CIA director David Petraeus.

The CIA says it will be able to 'read' these devices via the internet - and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home, Petraeus added.

Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps - and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells, according to the Daily Mail.

Petraeus said that web-connected gadgets will transform the art of spying - allowing spies to monitor people automatically without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a dinner party.

"Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters, all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing," he said.

Petraeus a former head of the allied forces in Afghanistan who became the CIA director on September 6, 2011, was speaking to a venture capital firm about new technologies which aim to add processors and web connections to previously 'dumb' home appliances such as fridges, ovens and lighting systems.

This week, one of the world's biggest chip companies, ARM, unveiled a new processor built to work inside 'connected' white goods.

The ARM chips are smaller, lower-powered and far cheaper than previous processors - and designed to add the internet to almost every kind of electrical appliance.

Futurists think that one day 'connected' devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times - and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.

Privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have warned of how information such as geolocation data can be misused - but as more and more devices connect, it's clear that opportunities for surveillance will multiply.